ZerOes (34 page)

It's Nellie who cuts through all the noise. “Lucy! Anna! Darla! Finish up with your food and no squabbling. Just because we have visitors it doesn't mean work can slide for the day. You hear me?”

They all nod in as mopey a fashion as they can muster.

But something pings Chance's brain. Maybe he misheard, but just the same: “Wait, who's Daisy, then? She's not one of your girls?”

Eyes turn toward him.

“No,” Cal says, then asks, “how do you know Daisy?”

The teenager, Lucy, crosses her arms over her head and looks suspiciously at him: “Yeah. How
do
you know her?”

Suddenly, Chance feels weirdly embarrassed, like he did something wrong, but just the same he says: “Last night, the, uhh, little one, Darla—”

“Anna,” the five-year-old says.

“No,” the eight-year-old says, “
I'm
Anna.”

Chance continues: “Darla said that
Daisy
said we were criminals.”

Something invisible transpires between the members of the Brockaway family. Cal's face is crestfallen, and Nellie—well, she just looks pissed. Darla says: “Uh-oh.” Lucy sighs, her face masked with sudden guilt.

“Where's the phone?” Cal asks. “Lucy.
Lucy
.”

“Upstairs,” she says. “Under my pillow.”

Nellie growls, incredulous: “How in heaven did you get that phone back?”

Lucy shrugs. “You guys think that locking the cabinet will stop me from picking the lock, but don't forget you taught me how to pick locks.”

To the rest of the room, Cal says: “That's actually true.”

“What the heck is going on here, Cal?” Wade asks.

Nellie answers by saying, “Lucy here has a jailbroken cell phone. It's supposed to be for
emergencies
, and yet she keeps taking it and talking to her friends from school.” She wheels on Cal. “I
told
you we should've homeschooled this one.”

“Children have to learn how to deal with other children, and they can't just get that at home, Nell,” Cal says.

Chance turns to Lucy. “Did you talk to Daisy about us?”

Reluctantly, she nods.

“How much did you tell her?”

“Some things. I dunno. I dunno!”

“Did you tell her . . . what we looked like? Our names? Anything?” She hesitates, but Chance says: “We aren't mad, but we need to know.”

“Maybe. I think so. I'm pretty sure I mentioned Wade, at least.”

Wade sighs. “Aw hell.”

“When did you talk to Daisy?” Chance asks her.

“Last night. After dinner.”

“We gotta go,” Wade says.

THE LODGE ZIGGURAT

G
olathan paces. Broken glass crunches under his feet. He kicks an empty brass casing across the soot-black floor. Some of the cafeteria tables have melted down into frozen plastic and metal waterfalls.

Outside, the light of day slides into night.

The man in front of Golathan is named Kyle Brown. Big son of a bitch. Got a nose so flat and so broad it looks almost like he's some kind of cartoon, or maybe a special effect. Brown stands stock straight, arms behind his back, chin lifted.

“At ease, Sergeant.” The man relaxes—but only a little. Keeps his eyes forward. On Brown's shoulder is a patch. An eagle. A pissed-off one, too—angry eyes, wide-open beak. In the valley of its wings hovers a set of crosshairs. In its claws is an automatic rifle. “You did a helluva job here, Sergeant.”

Brown's nervous. The hesitation gives it away. “Thank you, sir.” Brown clears his throat. “Homeland Security takes terrorism—domestic or otherwise—very seriously.”

“I can tell. We got a lot of bodies on the ground and . . .” Golathan whistles. “You burned this place to a cinder. We couldn't recover a single
actionable piece of intel. That's pretty impressive, really, because we're good at intel. It's our gig. We have all kinds of fancy little tricks and snazzy gadgets—and yet, nada.”

“Sir—”

Golathan continues to pace.
Crunch, crunch, crunch
. “It's almost as if someone wanted you to impede the investigation. Weird, huh?”

“Sir!”

“Spit it out, Sergeant.”

“Sir, you're the one who gave the order.”

Golathan stops walking. He sucks spit through his teeth. Wishes he had a cigarette. He's not sure how to play this—he's angry enough and so on edge that he's not sure he has much of a choice. Already tipped his hand, probably. Fine. Time to go all in. “Are you sure about that?” he asks.

Brown blinks. “What?”

“You're sure it was me.”

“Came through official channels.” And again Brown is nervous. He's not sure if this is some kind of psych test, or if Golathan is melting down bad as these tables did. Brown's probably thinking if he burns Golathan, if he takes a misstep, Golathan—crazy or no—could bury him. Get him assigned to some hick Home-Sec office in the middle of God-fucked Iowa. Brown continues: “We . . . I saw your face. We had you on video.”

Well. That's interesting
. “Thank you, Sergeant. You can go.”

Brown gives a clipped nod, then strides off.

Golathan calls after him: “Hey! Send in Molinari on your way out.” He knows he's getting played. Which pisses him off, because playing people is
his
job.

He wants to see his kids again. And his wife. Jesus, just to be
home
. Sit down on the couch, crack a beer—Susan lets him have one of those on the weekends. Hell, just to eat a
quinoa and kale
salad. Out here in the middle of nowhere, he has shit food to pick through. It's been hell on his bowels.

He's about to get on the phone and call for Molinari, but here she comes. An iPad held by her side, hand slid into the leather grip of it. “Don't hurry or anything,” he says.

“You're in a good mood.”

“Don't be snippy,” he says. “Not today.”

She stiffens. “Sorry.”

“Yeah. Fine. Where we at? We finding anything?”

She nods. “We found something.”

He claps his hands. “Good. Great. Lay it on me.”

“We figured out where they hid and how they escaped.”

“They? They who? The hackers?”

“Yes. The rogue pod.”

He sighs. “That's it?” She seems flummoxed, like she doesn't know what else she should be looking for. Which is true. She doesn't. He pinches the bridge of his nose. “Tell me, Sandy, how they escaped.”

“They hid underneath the decking here at the Lodge. It was assumed that they went out into the woods—and they may have. But while the soldiers canvassed the forest, they hid right here. Then, upon seeing an opportunity, stole keys from the corpse of a—” She tilts the iPad toward her, touches the screen. “James Roach. One of the guards here. Then they drove the stolen SUV out until . . .”

Golathan presses the heel of his hand into his forehead. That was two weeks ago and they don't have shit for leads. He presses hard enough that he starts to see stars. “And we don't have any sign of our rogue hacker friends.”

“Not one. Which means they're either traveling very smart and totally under the radar, or they're already out of the country.”

He shakes his head. “No, nuh-uh, I don't buy it. You can't just hop on a plane and go dark. This is five people. They're hackers, not fucking wizards. Somewhere, a camera will pick them up. You can't travel through the gears of bureaucracy without snagging your clothes on them. That means they're still here. And we need to find them.”

“Because they're terrorists.” Way she says it, though, it's as much a question as it is a statement.

“Right,” he says. “Terrorists.”

“We have the other hacker. Dipesh Dhaliwal.”

“He talking yet?”

“No. He seems . . . shell-shocked.”

“This is more than PTSD. He's gone catatonic, Sandy. Which means whatever he knows is not something
we
know. Not yet.”

Sandy licks her lips. A slight intake of breath—then she snaps her trap.

Golathan rolls his eyes. “Just say it, Sandy. What?”

“I don't understand what we're doing here.”

“Well, that's the universal question, Sandy. Nobody knows what we're doing here. Life often seems a meaningless procession of food, fucks, and bowel movements. Surely the great philosophers—”

“No, I mean
here
. At the Lodge.”

“I got the measure of your question, Molinari.” He pulls up a half-melted chair, dark with fireblack. He pushes it over to her. “Sit.”

“My skirt—”

“Fuck your skirt, I'm about to show you my balls. Not literally. I mean, I'm about to let you in on some secrets, but I want you sitting down.”

She wipes off the chair best as she can, then gingerly sits.

He puffs out his cheeks, then says: “Ooookay. Here's the deal. This whole meltdown of a place? I ordered its creation. But I did not order its destruction. Those men out there took orders from me, except I didn't give those orders. Someone faked my image, my voice, my credentials. See? I'm trying to find out what happened here because as it stands I don't really know. The rogue hackers may indeed be terrorists, but I don't know that. I do know I want to find them first. Before anybody else does.” He hesitates, then says, “All this relates to a program called Typhon.”

“I've heard about Typhon. It's a . . . surveillance initiative, right?”

He looks around, and kneels down. “It's supposed to be an artificial intelligence. Like Google's Deep Mind. An intelligent system designed to bolster our security-gathering capabilities. But now? Now I don't know
what
the fuck it is. Tomorrow morning, I'm heading out to do a site visit with its creator, a woman named Leslie Cilicia-Ceto. I want you to come with me.”

“Me?”

“Is there someone else in the room? You got a mouse in your pocket?”

“Thanks, Ken. I appreciate it.”

“Oh, trust me, you don't wanna be brought in on this. This isn't something to appreciate. Most Americans get to be ignorant. Even most government agents get to be pretty unaware of what really goes on. You're getting a front-row seat. And I promise: you won't appreciate one second of it.”

She offers her hand. “Do I need an upgraded security clearance?”

He takes it, shakes it. “Sandy, this business doesn't have security clearance. It has no ranking, no number, no nothing. It's so far off the books it's basically in outer space.”

Sandy nods. He sees the fear on her face. Good. She'll need that.

It's then the phone at her hip rings. It startles her.

He nods, tells her to take it.

She takes it, stands away, nods, uh-huh, sure, okay. Then she turns back around. “It's Agent Copper,” she says. “He's awake.”

CEDAR CREST HOSPITAL, ALLENTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA

H
ollis smacks his lips, pokes around through the off-brand strawberry gelatin cup the hospital gave him. The taste of fake sugar hits the back of his tongue. Why the hell they gotta put that stuff in everything? Bleached, chemical nastiness. Leaves an aftertaste like pool chlorine. He sets the cup on the table next to the hospital bed. The movement rattles the handcuff holding his
other
hand to the bed rail.

Enemy of the state. Him.
Him
.
Golathan, you son of a bitch
.

He turns on the television. Clicks over to the news, which is probably a mistake, but they told him he's been out cold—he refuses to even
think
the word
coma
—for two weeks. He needs to see what's been going on.

He flips through the news. What he sees is a world on the brink. That's normal, in a way—the news always reports everything as if everybody's just three seconds from the apocalypse. But Hollis knows you have to look past all that, have to look for patterns and try to tease out the reality. North Korea firing a missile sounds like a big deal, but usually isn't—it's almost always some failed Taepodong missile that couldn't blow up a hamster, so they fire the tin can into the ocean in the hopes of rattling everybody's cages. But today, he sees the DPRK
instead fired a proper missile—and, puzzlingly enough, not at South Korea, but at China. It didn't hit. It was never meant to (probably). But it landed in Chinese waters, not far from a Chinese carrier group out of Beijing. China is of course one of North Korea's biggest allies, though certainly an uncomfortable one—North Korea is like the crazy little brother that keeps kicking over the neighbor's potted plants and dropping flaming bags of dog shit on their doorstep. You protect them because they're your brother, but in private you drag them over the coals for acting like such an epic asshole.

Might be that North Korea is finally tired of those “private talks.” Then again, maybe it's something else. A mistake. Because another curious thing is: DPRK's been quiet about the whole thing. Normally by now they'd be waving their big balls around, talking about North Korean dominance and how they're ready to take over the world. But so far, all quiet.

Hollis flips the channel. Hits to the stock market. The Dow is way down. Cascading power outages on the West Coast. Some new bird flu on the East Coast. Ebola in Africa. Jihadis taken over Iraq. Snowden thought to be assassinated in the Ukraine. A school shooting in Oregon. On that one, Copper flinches. Flashes of Fellhurst again.

He turns off the TV. Sits for a while. He concentrates on his pain—the physical kind. It's easier to let that push everything else out. The pain becomes large, so large it overwhelms him. So bright it hurts, so white it pushes the rest of the darkness away, so strong it kills the stars.

When he opens his eyes again, Ken Golathan is standing there. “You real, or am I hallucinating?” Copper asks.

Golathan smiles. “I am woefully real, Agent.”

“Guess you caught yourself a Copperfish.”

“Guess we did.”

A stretch of uncomfortable silence.

“I'm trying to understand what happened that night,” Golathan finally says, pulling up a chair. “The night at the Lodge.”

“See, I thought you wanted to know what happened the night I lost my virginity. It was a tender evening in the back of my father's Buick LeSabre. She smelled like flowers and shampoo. I smelled like zit cream and mothballs—”

“Cut the shit, Copperfish. I'm the only friend you have at this point.”

Copper utters a dubious
hunh
. “Oh yeah, we're true-blue BFFs, you and I.”

“Walk me through that day and night.”

“For real?”

“For real.”

Copper tells him. Tells him everything, because he assumes Golathan already knows, so what's the point in burying it? He tells him about the cave. All the nonsense about Typhon. About how Wade already knew about Typhon—hell, most of the hackers seemed to, if Wade told it true. How the soldiers swept in there, started shooting up people. How Zebkavich was armed.

Golathan asks: “Thing I don't get is, you got away. We found you two miles from the site. North of the Lodge on the side of a winding mountain road. You were unconscious, you were bleeding out, and your lung had pancaked. How?”

“The soldiers saw I'd been shot and left me there to pursue my pod. When I had a second, I crawled my ass into the woods, to where I found that cave. Crawled through the cave and came out a drain culvert after dark. I couldn't breathe. I thought I was dying. Guess maybe I was.”

“Who used that cave?”

“You mean you don't know?”

Golathan shakes his head. Copper tries to read his face, tries to suss out whether or not he's telling the truth. Ken Golathan is a slippery shark—you can't get your hands around him. “I don't know, either,” Hollis finally says. “But whoever they are, they knew about Typhon. And they painted some pretty batshit stuff there.”

Golathan's face tightens, as if a migraine headache has hit him.

It's then that Copper realizes: Golathan doesn't know what the hell is going on.

“What is Typhon?” Copper asks. Figures, hey, why not pull a couple of bricks out of the Jenga tower, see if he can't knock it over?

Golathan trots out the same line without hesitation: “Typhon is a predictive surveillance system designed by a private defense contractor—”

“Bullshit. You're either selling me a story or you don't know.” Hollis sits forward.
“What is Typhon?”

“I don't even know anymore.”

“I thought you knew everything.”

“I thought I did, too, Copperfish. Typhon was supposed to be an
artificial intelligence. It still . . . is, I guess. But someone is manipulating it. I think I know who, though I don't yet know why. That is a mystery I am on my way to solve. Today.”

“And what about me?”

“You sit tight, little fishie.” Golathan stands. Approaches the bed. “Let's keep this quiet. For now.”

“You know, that's a real nice thought. I could tell people about Typhon. About how you got your rectum in a wringer over all this—how the mighty Ken Golathan doesn't know what's going on with a blacklist program he greenlit. I could even tell them how, all the way back, Golathan had some bad information about a school called Fellhurst, and how his screwup led to an agent putting a bullet in someone he wasn't supposed to, and how Golathan had to scramble to cover it all up. Remember: you can pin me with Fellhurst, but I can pin you right the fuck back.”

Golathan stands there. Chewing on that the way a baseball player breaks a sunflower seed. “I hear you. I want you to understand that all that is blood under the bridge. We're friends here because we have to be friends. I won't do you in if you don't do me in. We square, Copperfish?”

Play it cool, Copper
. He knows something's wrong. But now's not the time.

“We're square if you open these handcuffs. And if you quit calling me ‘Copperfish,' because it's a nickname I no longer care to abide.”

Golathan nods. “I'll send somebody in with the keys. But no promises on the nickname. Pals have nicknames for each other.”

“What's my nickname for you?”

“In high school football they called me Kenny Goalposts.”

“How about I just go with ‘Dickhead'?”

A shrug. “That works, too. See you on the other side, Copper.”

“See you later, Dickhead.”

Out in the hall, Sandy asks him how it went.

“Fine. Copper knows more than I'd like.”

“And what are you going to do about that?”

“Me? Nothing. Not one thing. I'm going to wish him the best life
that he can live. But I'm also going to recognize that he took a bullet through the arm and into his lung, and that he spent nearly two weeks comatose. I am sad for my friend who is in a fragile state of health, and if even one thing goes wrong—a mistake in his meds, an air bubble in his line, a MRSA infection from some dumb nurse who didn't wash her hands—then that is a terrible shame but a reality with which we must
all
contend.”

Sandy's jaw tightens and she visibly swallows. “Oh.”

“We have a plane to catch. Ready for this?”

“Yes. Yeah. Of course.”